“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.” – Joe Hewitt

In the early days of social networking,
the dominant player was MySpace. As time went by, MySpace was joined
by other players like Facebook and Twitter. MySpace has since lost
the top position in the social networking world to Facebook.

In
October, traffic numbers for September 2009 for social networking
sites came in and Facebook had over
300 million users, pushing MySpace to second place in user
numbers. One of the things that Facebook users on the iPhone enjoy
and that contributed to the user numbers is the Facebook iPhone app,
which is the most popular app on the App Store.

The developer
that built the Facebook app for the iPhone has quit
development for the iPhone and passed the app off to another
engineer at Facebook. TechCrunch reports that Facebook App
developer Joe Hewitt is still at Facebook and is simply working on
new projects.

Exactly what projects the Hewitt is working on
are unknown. As for the reason why the developer stopped developing
for the iPhone, the reason is clear. Hewitt said, "My decision
to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s
policies." Hewitt says that he is "philosophically opposed"
to the existence of a review process and that he is worried Apple's
policy might be implemented by other companies seeking to mimic
Apple's App store success.

Apple has been under increasing
scrutiny for its practices of approving and disapproving apps that
are seemingly haphazardly enforced. Apple has found itself in hot
water with the FCC after the FCC asked AT&T and Apple to explain
why they rejected Google Voice from the App Store.

One
particularly tough question the FCC posed to the AT&T and Apple
was, "Do any devices that operate on AT&T’s network allow
use of the Google Voice application? Do any devices that operate on
AT&T’s network allow use of other applications that have been
rejected for the iPhone."

Despite Hewitt's stepping away
form iPhone development for Facebook, the social networking giant
still has people working on its iPhone application. Perhaps the
action by a high profile developer will spur others to speak out
about the Apple app approval process.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

As an iPhone owner, I can speak for many of us when I say - we don't give a rats ass about Flash. I'm not against it, but if there was support, I would hope there would be an option to turn it off. There are a few improvements I would like to see - such as expandable memory, and better multi-tasking (it is there on the iPhone, but limited) but overall it does every business task I need it to do.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer